I’m amazed this hasn’t been all over the news. This is the same type of bill that caused major outrage when Arizona considered passing religious discrimination into law. Perhaps no one cares about Mississippi.

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You cannot have a rational conversation with someone who holds irrational beliefs.

I agree. We will have to wait till the law is used to defend someone’s “religious freedom to discriminate”, and then it will start working its way through the courts and start making some headlines. Like when a city, county, or state clerk uses it to refuse service to a citizen they determine to be infringing on their rights to practice their religion. Or perhaps more interestingly when the law is evoked by someone from a religion or religious point of view that this law was “not” intended to protect.

It had to happen, and I for one am very excited to see how legalized discrimination plays out against the constitution. I love it when the far right shows their true colors.

Danny

A Mississippi resident has been quoted as saying that the passage of this law has made him ill and for the first time in his life to seriously think of leaving Mississippi.

I wonder, does he mean there is nothing else about Mississippi that made him ill and want to move out of Mississippi, the state that’s at the bottom of every list about quality of life, education and human rights? What’s wrong with him?

He should leave along with every other sentient being in the state. Let it self-destruct. It’s the best thing that could happen to it.

Mississippi has the lowest median household income, making it the poorest state in the nation.

On August 30, 2007, a report by the United States Census Bureau indicated that Mississippi was the poorest state in the country. Many cotton farmers in the Delta have large, mechanized plantations, some of which receive extensive federal subsidies, yet many other residents still live as poor, rural, landless laborers. Of $1.2 billion from 2002–2005 in federal subsidies to farmers in the Bolivar County area of the Delta, 5% went to small farmers. There has been little money apportioned for rural development. Small towns are struggling. More than 100,000 people have left the region in search of work elsewhere. The state had a median household income of $34,473.

As of January 2010, the state’s unemployment rate was 10.9%.

The latest data shows that Mississippi has the highest teenage birth rate in the United States. Mississippi’s rate is more than 60 percent above the U.S. average.

Public opinion polls have consistently ranked Mississippi as the most religious state in the United States, with 59% of Mississippians considering themselves “very religious”.

The state is ranked 50th or last place among all the states for health care, according to the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit foundation working to advance performance of the health care system. For three years in a row, more than 30 percent of Mississippi’s residents have been classified as obese. In a 2006 study, 22.8 percent of the state’s children were classified as such. Mississippi had the highest rate of obesity of any U.S. state from 2005–2008 and also ranks first in the nation for high blood pressure, diabetes, and adult inactivity. In a 2008 study of African-American women, contributing risk factors were shown to be: lack of knowledge about body mass index (BMI), dietary behavior, physical inactivity and lack of social support, defined as motivation and encouragement by friends. A 2002 report on African-American adolescents noted a 1999 survey which suggests that a third of children were obese, with higher ratios for those in the Delta.

In 2004, Mississippi voters approved a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and prohibiting Mississippi from recognizing same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. The amendment passed 86% to 14%, the largest margin in any state.

Section 265 of the Constitution of the State of Mississippi declares that “No person who denies the existence of a Supreme Being shall hold any office in this state.”

In 2008, Mississippi was ranked last among the fifty states in academic achievement by the American Legislative Exchange Council’s Report Card on Education, with the lowest average ACT scores and sixth lowest spending per pupil in the nation. According to the report, 92% of Mississippi high school graduates took the ACT and 3% took the SAT, in comparison to the national averages of 43% and 45%, respectively.

In 2007, Mississippi students scored the lowest of any state on the National Assessments of Educational Progress in both math and science.

Mississippi is currently ranked third from the bottom of the American Human Development Index.

So the most important thing the legislature can think of to do is pass a law allowing religious discrimination. That will certainly go a long way toward bringing Mississippi out of the dark ages.

Thank you Lois, for all the illustrations of how backward faith based cultures continually shoot themselves in the foot, and ask for more. Your reference to the dark ages is interesting because it optimizes the religious idea that this life is made for suffering and is of little importance compared to the joyous afterlife religion promises; A hollow existence will be rewarded after death.

I’m amazed this hasn’t been all over the news. This is the same type of bill that caused major outrage when Arizona considered passing religious discrimination into law. Perhaps no one cares about Mississippi.

At the risk of offending someone from Mississippi, I would speculate that most people in the “rest” of America do not consider this a surprise as Mississippi generally is at the bottom of the rung in terms of human rights, health and most other progressive concepts. Then there are the other states such as AL, GA & TN that have many of the same issues.